Teaching Resources

What the Best College Teachers Do

What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators. Available through Amazon: What The Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain, Harvard University Press, 2004.

The short answer is--it's not what teachers do, it's what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out--but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn.

Some Resources for Cultivating Learning in Large Classes (and maybe some small ones too)

Large Introductory Courses: Resources Teaching Large Courses Project funded by the Australian Universities Teaching Committee (AUTC), a national body aimed at improving teaching and learning in Australian universities.

University of Maryland Center for Teaching Excellence site, Teaching Large Classes, has resources, a newsletter and links.

Student-Centered Teaching

Donald L. Finkel and G. Stephen Monk, "Teachers and learning groups: Dissolution of the Atlas Complex." (PDF) — Finkel and Monk define the Atlas complex as a "state of mind that keeps teachers fixed in the center of their classroom, supporting the entire burden of responsibility for the course on their own shoulders. This state of mind is hardened by the expectations that surround teachers and by the impact of the experience that results from them."

Writing

The Little Red Schoolhouse material from the University of Chicago. Parts of the Little Red Schoolhouse materials on writing (probably the best guide to writing in the English language) are posted here as Word files AFTER they have been given in class. They will remain posted for only three sessions, so follow the postings during a semester and pick them up quickly. At no time is the entire set posted at one time.

Case-based or problem-based methods

Problem-Based Learning (PDF). Speaking of Teaching: Stanford University Newsletter on Teaching 11 (1), 2001, contains background on this approach, methods, advice on how to start and bibliography.